Technical Account Manager

Empowering retail success: how Cisco and Zebra transform operations. In today's fast-paced retail environment, downtime isn't just inconvenient, it's costly. When a handheld scanner fails during peak shopping hours or a mobile computer disconnects in the middle of a Buy Online, Pick Up In-Store (BOPIS) transaction, the impact extends to customer satisfaction, employee productivity, and ultimately, the bottom line. The strategic partnership between Cisco and Zebra Technologies, which includes Cisco Wireless and ThousandEyes integrations with Zebra mobile computers and scanners, is addressing these challenges head-on, delivering deeper visibility and control for retail organizations. The challenge: the visibility gap. Retail IT teams have long faced a frustrating challenge. They're responsible for maintaining seamless operations across stores, warehouses, and distribution centers, and they've operated with limited visibility into the very devices that power these operations. The 2026 Cisco State of Wireless Report shines a light on this, revealing how 86% of retail wireless professionals state a lack of visibility impacts their ability to manage operations, with client and application visibility gaps causing the most problems. When a Zebra mobile computer or scanner experiences connectivity issues, troubleshooting becomes an exercise in educated guesswork. Was it a roaming problem? Battery depletion? A firmware bug? The answers too often remain locked within the devices themselves, forcing IT teams into reactive, time-consuming diagnostic processes. This visibility gap translates directly into business impact. In retail, every minute of device downtime, disrupted connectivity, or application degradation can mean delayed customer service, abandoned transactions, incomplete inventory counts, or disrupted fulfillment operations. For organizations operating on razor-thin margins, these inefficiencies can accumulate quickly. The native integrations between Zebra, Cisco Wireless, and Cisco ThousandEyes are built to address these challenges through real-time intelligence and end-to-end assurance. Let's take a closer look. Cisco Wireless and Zebra: maximum efficiency through deep real-time visibility. The unique integration between Cisco Wireless and Zebra Technologies fundamentally changes how retailers can minimize the negative business impacts caused by lack of visibility into the devices and environments driving so much of their operations. By surfacing Zebra-specific telemetry directly within the Meraki Dashboard, retail IT teams now have immediate access to critical device intelligence including device model, OS version, serial numbers, and, perhaps most importantly, detailed disassociation reason codes. This last capability represents a huge leap in troubleshooting efficiency. Instead of generic "disconnected" notifications, the system now reveals exactly why a device left the network: planned roaming, low-signal dropout, or manual disconnect. This granular insight transforms troubleshooting from art to science, enabling IT teams to identify patterns, proactively address issues, and resolve problems in minutes rather than hours. And all of this is done without requiring any end-point software, meaning less to manage for IT teams. For retail operations, this native integration means associates equipped with Zebra devices can maintain continuous connectivity during critical tasks, such as processing returns, conducting inventory audits, or fulfilling online orders. The result is improved operational efficiency, enhanced customer experiences, and reduced IT support burden. Figure 1. Meraki Dashboard natively integrates and displays client analytics from Zebra devices Cisco ThousandEyes and Zebra: end-to-end assurance through proactive insights. Everyone thinks mobile monitoring is just about whether an app is up or down. Cisco Systems believe it's about what users actually experience - every tap, every delay, every network hop. While others measure surface-level performance, the Cisco + Zebra solution, powered by ThousandEyes Mobile Endpoint Agent, captures true end-user experience directly from the device - across networks, applications, and locations - through proactive testing where problems actually occur. By continuously simulating real user journeys from Zebra scanners and mobile computers, IT and helpdesk teams gain near real-time visibility across the entire digital delivery chain, from device and Wi-Fi or mobile connectivity to Internet health and application performance. Without this level of proactive, device-driven insight, you're blind to what your users actually feel. Issues hide in the last mile, across unmanaged or unreliable networks, and in real-world conditions that are impossible to replicate in controlled environments. This is especially critical in frontline retail, warehouses, and mobile delivery operations, where connectivity may be poor or non-existent and workers rely on multiple cloud-based systems for inventory, transactions, and customer engagement. Without visibility where it matters most, teams chase false leads, outages take longer to resolve, and customer experience suffers before issues are even detected. With the integration of ThousandEyes Mobile Endpoint Agents on Zebra devices, as performance issues unfold, technicians can be alerted and quickly zero in on health scores and key metrics to visually determine the source of the problem, whether at the device, network, or application level, dramatically accelerating resolution times. "For many organizations, their most critical operations happen at the edge - on handheld devices used in supply chains, manufacturing floors, customer onboarding, and parcel delivery. If any part of that digital chain breaks, it directly impacts revenue and customer fulfillment. With ThousandEyes Mobile Endpoint Agent on Zebra devices, we provide end-to-end visibility from the device to the network and cloud services all the way to the application, helping businesses quickly identify and resolve issues before they disrupt critical operations." - Katherine Kehoe, Product Manager Lead, Cisco ThousandEyes Figure 2. ThousandEyes Mobile Endpoint Experience displays end-end health from the Zebra mobile device to the application. Business outcomes that matter. For retail organizations embracing digital transformation, a comprehensive approach such as the one offered through the Cisco and Zebra partnership ensures that technology enablement translates into tangible business outcomes rather than operational headaches. "Our partnership with Cisco is focused on helping customers unlock greater value from the devices they deploy across stores, warehouses, and field operations. By combining Zebra's device telemetry with Cisco Wireless analytics and ThousandEyes end-to-end visibility, we're enabling organizations to gain the operational insight needed to support workers productivity and ensure consistent performance across their entire digital environment." - Rowan Fuller, Global Partnerships Leader, Zebra Technologies Beyond technological capabilities, these integrations can deliver measurable business value: * Reduced Downtime: Faster troubleshooting means less disruption to front and back of house operations, directly protecting revenue and customer satisfaction. * Improved Productivity: Associates spending more time serving customers and less time dealing with malfunctioning devices or waiting for IT support. * Proactive Management: Pattern recognition enabling IT teams to identify and address issues, such as updating firmware for specific device batches or addressing coverage gaps in particular store locations, before they impact operations. * Scalable Operations: As retail organizations expand their footprint or device deployments, comprehensive visibility ensures consistent performance across all locations without proportionally increasing IT resources. The future of retail technology. These integrations represent more than a point solution; they serve as a foundation for enhanced predictive maintenance and intelligent automation. As retail continues evolving toward more connected, data-driven operations, partnerships like the one between Cisco and Zebra provide the infrastructure for sustainable competitive advantage. For retail IT leaders evaluating technology investments, the question isn't whether to embrace this level of visibility, it's how quickly they can deploy it to capture the operational and financial benefits. To learn more about Cisco ThousandEyes Mobile Endpoint Experience, visit: www.thousandeyes.com/solutions/assurance-for-mobile-business

ThousandEyes and the Black Hat USA 2025 experience: A network perspective. Cisco ThousandEyes has been an integral part of Black Hat's mission to provide a great attendee experience since 2023. At the recent Black Hat USA event in August, ThousandEyes naturally wanted its deployment to continue to grow and develop, while also incorporating the latest and greatest that ThousandEyes has to offer. As you might have read in previous years, Black Hat's deployment is somewhat unique. The show is split into two major phases: trainings and the conference. This is an important distinction because the monitoring needs shift based on the phase: * Training days require ThousandEyes to keep a close eye on room-specific SSIDs. * Conference days rely on a single conference-wide SSID to provide network coverage. For this endeavor, its team developed a set of 14 new Enterprise Agents based on the Orange Pi 5 Plus platform, which, when added to the 17 existing agents, gave ThousandEyes a total of 31 agents to monitor rooms. These new agents had Wi-Fi 6 capabilities thanks to their PCIe M.2 expansion cards. This improved operational consistency of the hardware over the USB Wi-Fi cards. Its old Raspberry Pis from past events also made an appearance, this time with a Power over Ethernet (PoE) Hardware Attached on Top (HAT) that removed the need for an external power source. These battle-hardened agents were deployed on the distribution switches connected to the different APs serving the network. This granted both first- and second-hop visibility into its traffic. In addition to these portable agents, ThousandEyes also had an agent deployed in the server room as a virtual appliance, which enabled ThousandEyes to run its tests closer to the network edge, bringing the final tally to 42 Enterprise Agents for monitoring. Agent setup. Getting the Enterprise Agents ready was no easy feat, especially during the training phase of the conference. Each agent needed to be deployed with a different set of SSIDs and PSKs for each one of the training rooms. To make this more manageable, ThousandEyes relied heavily on automation - specifically in the form of both custom scripts and Ansible playbooks. Once ThousandEyes had the agent running, ThousandEyes needed to make sure each device had its room-specific SSID configuration in place. For this, ThousandEyes used a custom Bash script that took the correct SSID and PSK for each device, constructed a valid NetworkManager .nmconnection file, and pushed the file to the device. This ensured that both administrative overhead and human error were kept to a minimum during the setup. Once the training phase was completed and ThousandEyes moved into the conference days, the same script was used to push the conference-wide SSID configuration data to the devices. Once configured, its devices were deployed in the training rooms in inconspicuous places. Monitoring coverage. To make sure that all attendees were having a good experience with the network, ThousandEyes decided to run tests that would verify the performance and availability of both internal and external resources. These tests included: * Connectivity and performance of the major cloud providers: AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. * Connectivity to the internal Umbrella DNS endpoint. * Connectivity from the server room to the external Umbrella endpoint. * As an overall estimate of SSID health, throughput tests for 50 MB and 100MB files. Due to the large number of agents at its disposal, and how often its tests were being run, a bit of tweaking was required so that its tests' traffic would not saturate the network at once. Fortunately, ThousandEyes' API came to the rescue, allowing ThousandEyes to enable randomized start times for all its tests and keep those requests staggered. The resulting data was then collected and, with the assistance of the always-helpful test labels, displayed for the NOC team on a set of different dashboards. Incident resolution with ThousandEyes. During the conference, ThousandEyes agents were instrumental in making sure the attendee experience was on point. Below are a few examples of ThousandEyes working behind the scenes to save the day. Detecting unavailable Wi-Fi in a training room. On August 5th, ThousandEyes identified a network issue where the Wi-Fi went offline for a specific training room, named Breakers I. The investigation began when ThousandEyes observed that the Enterprise Agent in this room went completely offline. This meant that the agent's wireless uplink became unavailable or there was an issue with the agent itself. An agent going offline triggered an Agent Alert, sending a notification to the NOC team. On the ThousandEyes platform, the results of the tests assigned to this agent stopped coming in, indicating a disastrous unavailability event: Using existing infrastructure close to this room, ThousandEyes logged in via SSH to the agent next door. A Wi-Fi radio scan was performed to list the available SSIDs in the area. This confirmed that the "BreakersI" SSID was not being broadcast at all. This issue was escalated to the wireless partner for further analysis. They confirmed an issue with the access point and restored the network to provide the best experience for the attendees. Jasmine D in trouble. On August 4th, its test results reported a concerning drop in throughput (from its regular ~75 Mbps to just over 1Mbps!) for one of the training rooms: Jasmine D. This drop caused its HTTP test to time out and eventually flag an issue. ThousandEyes immediately SSH'd into the device to get more information and, to its surprise, ThousandEyes discovered that the SSID ThousandEyes were connecting to (JasmineD, of course) was not providing the best signal strength. To further troubleshoot the issue, ThousandEyes decided to deploy an Endpoint Agent on one of its laptops and survey the affected room. What ThousandEyes found was, to be honest, kind of expected. The raw user experience was inconsistent - the same application could take anywhere from 3 to 30 seconds to load, or even time out entirely. Using Real User tests provided better visibility into the issue, with wireless signal strength, gateway latency, and page load times being the biggest issues; while scheduled tests confirmed that gateway latency (sometimes reaching 2000ms of latency!) was off. Just as a reminder, that gateway IP is its access point. * All applications have inconsistent performance * The room's SSID received signal strength is not great * Latency to the AP is through the roof Diagnosis: The access point's signal is not getting to its users properly. The issue was reported to the wireless team, which helped confirm that the particular SSID was getting provisioned by the access point located in JasmineB (the next room over) - hence why the wireless signal strength was so low inside the affected room. Increasing the Tx power overnight on the AP so the signal could better reach JasmineD fixed the issue. Automated alerting. One of ThousandEyes' cornerstones is the ability to integrate with third-party solutions for different purposes, from data streaming using OpenTelemetry to alert forwarding using webhooks. Since most of the NOC team's communications took place over Slack, the solution was simple: integrate with Slack to notify about ThousandEyes alerts. What use is its data if ThousandEyes cannot get notified when something goes awry? ThousandEyes provides broad visibility into the attendee's experience. To maximize the value of the collected insights, it is a strategic necessity to correlate the data on the centralized analytics platform used for the event: Splunk. This was executed seamlessly with the Cisco ThousandEyes App for Splunk. It is a simple, powerful add-on that simplifies the configuration process for streaming data from ThousandEyes to Splunk. At Black Hat, ThousandEyes used it to stream all ThousandEyes-collected metrics and create cross-platform dashboards. Once the add-on is installed, an authorization connector must be added. Behind the scenes, OAuth 2.0 is utilized to authenticate and authorize Splunk to configure ThousandEyes. On the Splunk platform, open the "Cisco ThousandEyes App for Splunk" via the Apps menu. In the Configuration tab, click Add to authorize a new ThousandEyes user. Follow the authentication steps. You will see a screen to authorize Splunk to access ThousandEyes on behalf of the user. Once completed, a data input is added by switching to the "Inputs" tab. Click Create New Input | Test Stream. Fill in the required fields and select the tests you wish to stream to Splunk. Once confirmed, the real-time metrics will be streamed to Splunk. Refer to the ThousandEyes OpenTelemetry Data Model documentation for the full set of available metrics. Its thanks to the Cisco team at Black Hat. ThousandEyes extend its appreciation to the dozens of professionals who made the Black Hat USA 2025 NOC a great success. About Black Hat. Black Hat is the cybersecurity industry's most established and in-depth security event series. Founded in 1997, these annual, multi-day events provide attendees with the latest in cybersecurity research, development, and trends. Driven by the needs of the community, Black Hat events showcase content directly from the community through briefing presentations, training courses, summits, and more. Black Hat is an event series where all career levels and academic disciplines convene to collaborate and network, with events held in the United States, Canada, Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and Asia. For more information, please visit www.blackhat.com.